Where (25 page)

Everything is dark and quiet now that Father and them are gone, like God or my sensei or the game designers or space aliens or foreign power that yanked us out of our lives and dumped us here want it dark for whatever comes next. From here I can hear that thud-thudding as father's engine roars on.

Then the moon comes up all quick and mechanical, like it's making a path to wherever I'm supposed to go.

That way. Down this road that leads out of the compound all the way to the rim.

Holy fuck, this is huge. Holy fuck!

After all the running and the pointless searching I'm at the edge of creation, with nothing but a belt of sand between me and the rim, and, wow! Out there the sand shifts and starts moving, even though there's no wind. Like it's sifting down into cracks in the shape of a …

Square. It's a trap door, and bingo bongo, the sun comes out like a spotlight on a stage set and I see …

Oh shit, Rawson Steele, coming up from underground. He looks around and hoists himself out to scope the horizon, making sure it's safe. He stands out like a panther in a kid's sandbox in those black sweats, even at this distance. I'm all,
Get down, stupid, they're after you!
but I'm so far away that he doesn't see. He's taking his damn time. From where he's standing, there's nothing to see yet, nothing to hear. He might not hear it, but there's a beginning vibration in the road, it's coming up through the cement, into the soles of my feet.

They're coming.

I have to warn him:
Get down, get down!
But if I yell, it will bring them. If he already knows they're close, he doesn't show it. Either that or he doesn't care.

If he knows they're out to get him, which is just about to happen, it's like, this is nothing to him. I jump up and down and wave my arms to warn him but he just stands there scoping the area between him and the rim. I strip off my shirt and start across the sand, waving it. Like anything will head him off. He bends double over the hatch, reaching down for— right. My big sister comes out blinking. Fucking Merrill, deer, headlights, that thing.

The breeze picks up and the sound of a hundred people yowling blows our way. I yell, “Get down, get down!”

Is he deaf?

Does he not feel the thunder in the sand?

Shit, maybe he does. Merrill rises up into his arms like a living statue and I love them for being here and being alive and looking so great together in the sunlight, but I hate them for being linked like lovers and exposing themselves just now;
I have to warn them,
I'm running, running hard with all hell coming up my heels and, yow!

They're here! The machine is here and it's too late for anything to happen except what Father wants, which is where this has been heading the whole time.

I am running flat-out, screaming, “Dammit, Rawson, fuck!”

Until the front ranks smash into me and knock me flat and rage on, fixing to get Ray's killer and rip his head off and, on the way to the execution, stomp me into the sand.

Then something big— Delroy!— yanks me out of the mess by the hair
eeeyow
and, holy crap, big old Delroy Root picks me up like a baby and mashes me into his front and takes off, running back the way we came. We're thumping upstream, but nobody sees. They're focused on their target, coming down on him like a swarm of killer bees.

Delroy runs so hard and fast that my bones rattle and I lose it altogether and bury my head in his shirt. I was never part of the machine, I know, I was never Hydra Destroyer, I'm not even a man. I was only ever Ned Poulnot, going on fourteen. Finally, Delroy stops. He puts me down, sort of holding my shoulders so I won't fall over. “Are you hurt?”

I have to open my eyes.
Not really.
We are back in the plaza. “What the fuck, Delroy?”

But Delroy doesn't hear. He's watching them come pouring back into the plaza, the seize-and-capture happened that fast. He stands on the base of the flagpole and looks for Father, watching until Father rises up on Wayland Archambault's shoulders and waves that fucking bloody shirt. Then he jumps down. Turns out Delroy is Father's main man, and when you see Delroy coming,
look out
. He lifts my father off Wayland and sets him up on his own shoulders, like it used to was. At the base of the flagpole, Delroy puts him down on the high pedestal so Father stands high above the others, ready to tell us what comes next.

They are fixing to run Rawson Steele up that flagpole or stone him or beat the crap out of him, and they'll keep at it for a long time after he's dead.

This is confusing and terrible, Kraven islanders milling around in the plaza, still crazy from the hunt and crying for blood when there's too much blood splashing everywhere and I don't know whose it is because in the excitement, a lot of people got hurt. Eight guys grapple Rawson Steele up the steps to the flagpole where Father stands like King Solomon fixing to cut the baby in half. They back him up against the pole— which he takes to, good, strong knight on a pedestal with his head up and a proud, sharp look that says
fuck you all.

Down below, Wayland Archambault has stupid Merrill clamped in place, although she's scratching and biting, and just before the execution or whatever, it gets unbearable and I break out. I can't fucking stand it. I run at dumb Wayland head-on and punch him in the nuts and he screams and lets go. Merrill wheels on him just then and rakes her fingernails across his eyes and before he can get them open, she breaks free.

It's so cool. My big sister is, like, blazing with rage so hot that the people around her back off and let her go; in seconds she's up there on the platform, plowing into Father, beating on him with both fists until he stumbles and falls off the step, which who gives a shit what happens to him then.

So my sister Merrill is right up there on the pedestal with my best friend Rawson Steele, what a rush! She's shouting to drown out the bawling, monstrous hate, but they don't hear. The mob surges up the steps, ready for the kill. Then Merrill,
Merrill Poulnot
lifts her head like Liberty and steps back until she's standing bang in front of our guy with her chin up and both arms spread, like that samurai goddess of war. Then everybody in the plaza understands— they can't mistake it— and it all goes silent. Then …

 

25

Dave

Alone out here at the edge of his world, Dave Ribault shudders.
There's got to be a reason.
Yeah, right.

Solitude has made him meditative. The last living human he spoke to was Earl, and that at the beginning of this long day. Since then he's been to the Harbor City Inn and found the milk box empty— no plans, nothing to show for his theft. He has used up the rest of the day cross-hatching the empty island, haunting other people's houses; he's rifled their kitchens and moved on without knowing what he's really looking for. He looked and kept looking until changing light marked the shift into late afternoon.

Now it's time to wait. Not sure where, doesn't know why, but he knows what he'll do next is wait.

After too long, he comes to ground; it seems like the right place. He's sitting on old Bill Deloach's overturned skiff here in the shallows, watching the tide go out. He's near the mouth of the tidal creek, where he last saw Earl. His best friend touched the bill of his crap baseball cap with that it's-your-funeral grin and headed out to open water and back into his life. Earl moved on with the keen, entitled look of a man who knows these waters so well that he can go anywhere he wants.

Dave watched his best friend and Boogie out of sight and thought:
Finally
.

He thought silence would put him into the right head, but it hasn't. After a long day of backing and filling, stymied in all the old neighborhoods— not skulking, exactly, just keeping low— he has returned to the marsh. Right. This is right.

All that conjecture, all this grief and he's no closer to understanding; he's looked everywhere and done everything and Merrill is just as gone. Not dead, just gone. Things happen and people deal with it and move on, but when someone you love goes missing, you're never done. The truth of it is, he realizes, when people vanish, the mystery lives on.

The one you lost and never find lives on forever, troubling the hearts of every soul she left behind.

This is just wrong.
The power of lost colonies is that nobody ever knows why or how they vanished, or where they went. That famous one, almost five hundred years ago— where was it— Roanoke. Those people are long dead, but not. The Missing in Action in a dozen wars. Hundreds from that plane they never found. They're all still out there somewhere, he thinks:
like vanishing can keep a whole colony alive
.

He can't stop worrying the question. What happened? Is it something we did? Little Virginia Dare, the lost from the deserted
Marie Celeste,
no signs of a struggle, food on the stove, were their pillows still warm? The lost are eternal: still adrift on that raft, safe on some island or floating captives on a pirate ship. People die and you burn or bury them, but unless you know the outcome the lost live on and on, precisely because they never came back.

So, is Merrill eternal now?

The rest hits hard:
They never come back.

What did Earl say? “There are things we know and things we'll never know.”

Dave grieves, trying to imagine his life going on like this, the last Ribault hanging in here on Kraven island, getting old alone for no known reason. Merrill out there somewhere he can't go, living on and on. He's spent his life trying to create order in blueprints: symmetry on plots of land where there's no place to lay a straight line, blind Ribault trying to hold back entropy with his meticulous site plans, defying chaos with precision, uncertainty with design.

Now this.

The dead rock bottom.
What Merrill is, is, she's gone.

Yes, he is circling the drain. All this looking for root causes and he still doesn't know.

You only thought you understood.

His shout is so loud that birds fly up. It surprises even him. “I'm sorry, Earl.”

About the reason.
This is less for Earl than for himself.
There is no fucking reason.
God he is depressed. With the day on the wane and everybody he cares about absent, he's not even sure why he's sitting out here exposed, so near the point. He thinks it's safe enough. The official presence has holed up in the bar at the Harbor City Inn. With nobody allowed on the island after foot patrols cleared the perimeter, the house to house search on Kraven island is done. He could just as easily go back to Merrill's house and wait for whatever happens next to happen, slouched in his favorite chair in front of the dead TV; he could wait comfortably in anyone's house or any vacation shack on the tidal creek at his back, but for whatever reasons he chose this spot where sawgrass gives way to water at high tide. Now he's sitting with his feet in wet sand with water creeping up on him.

The occasional surveillance plane, drone, helicopter buzzes over in the late afternoon light: military, news groups, every lookyloo with access to a private plane, but it's not like they're actually looking, they're just doing what people do. Every once in a while a Coast Guard cutter comes close, but from a distance, knowing what you can and can't see in the tidelands, Dave could pass for a log, a heap of mud. As though he has vanished from the face of the earth, but he hasn't.

He's here. Everybody else he cares about is gone. Now, where the fuck are they?

You're going along OK, pretty much set in your life, and then something like
this
happens. She's gone. They're gone.

Nobody knows why. It's a fucking mystery. All this thought, all this flailing and it's still a mystery, and right now he's alone with it, thinking,
What's the point?

He sits on Deloach's upturned boat getting bleaker and bleaker until a flight of gulls takes off for the last time today. There's nothing in his life right now but the racket they make, departing, the sound of critters running in the marsh grass and the slap of the receding tide. That and the wish that he could look back up the creek and see somebody coming this way. He would be
so fucking grateful
even for one of the rent-a-cops to come up behind him and break the silence, clap a hand on his shoulder, anything to take his mind off this or, wait. Best-case scenario. Shoot him dead.

Dave Ribault is waiting. Waiting is all he is. Damn Earl, with his, “There are things we know and things we'll never know.”

It puts him right back in college, with the math freak offering his take on G
ö
del's theorem of incompleteness: “Think of it as the hand reaching for the cup; it keeps reaching and the cup goes on receding.”